What being a forty-something, brown, female writer sometimes means.

Dr Tasneem PerryPhoto credit Tony Gribben

Writing is a solitary life choice. Most writers will tell you that they write not because they have to or want to, but because they must.

I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember. I used to write in diaries, on scrapes of paper and day-dream stories as an only child with very little privacy from over-protective, over-intrusive parents, my mother especially. I know it came from attachment and love, but it was exhausting and I often was afraid to write anything down on paper because it would be read when I was out of the house. This meant that I tended to live in my head, write in my head. As you can imagine, I was a strange, solitary child.

I wrote this post for the Women’s Words Mcr blog that I wrote posts for and managed. Re-reading it today made me realise it was powerful writing that I needed to modify and post here too. You can read the full blog post here.

Dr Tasneem Perry (me)

The Women’s Words project brought out many stories. It illustrated to those of us involved in the creative side of its management how important providing safe spaces for dialogue are for women. As the stories of sexual abuse, injustice and violence against women keep appearing in the media, and more and more people talk about the traumas they have gone through, it seems this project could not have come at a better time. We all have hurts. We all need to share them and expose them to the light so that we can learn from each other and take solace in each other. A hundred years since the granting of suffrage to some women, we have come a long way. But we have much more to achieve in terms of true equality. Here’s to all the women and men working together to build a truly just, equal and fair society.